Handwritten
by wolfbadtreepretty
Summary: Years down the line, she finds the notebook from her summer in DC and letters never sent.


**Handwritten**  
><strong>Years down the line, she finds the notebook from her summer in DC and letters never sent.<strong>  
><strong>The characters and world within do not belong to me.<strong>

* * *

><p>It's buried in the bottom of her Jess box: a worn, yellowing spiral notebook. There's a sticker for some event or another that she attended in DC and the name Rory Gilmore in her neat, tiny handwriting in the upper left corner.<p>

She wrote so often that summer, her writer's bump swelled and blistered. There had been binders and notebooks with pages full of words.

Her letters to Jess, like she can re-read and remember now with yellowed paper and faded ink, were never pages and rarely more than lines. They never found mailboxes or post offices, always sitting in notebooks or shredded envelopes. She would destroy some evidence and cherish other.

She thinks she may have wanted Dean to find it, at the time, and the thought stops her. She has not thought about Dean since she began seeing Logan, sophomore year of Yale. She shakes her head, opening the notebook.

**_Dear Jess,_**

_Two words. She has already written this letter dozens of times, the curl of the letters engraved into the pages behind them until she cannot write anything else on page-after-page._

_She actually almost sends this one, has twelve times now. She has put it in envelopes and addressed it. She even got to the stamp twice._

_It never saw a mailbox, though. She didn't think it said enough. So shall it be again, she thinks, turning the page._

She traces a finger over his name, mouths it like a prayer. _Dear Jess,_is the words she lived by that summer, and the summer after.

She continued to write him the next summer, she remembers, with no place to send the letters and no reason to try.

The notebook with those letters was left in a hotel room in Ireland, _Dear Jess_marking every page with hope and the death of it. That was how she had let go of him:

leaving a notebook on a duvet in another country.

It never helped, but she thought it would because it hurt. Instead, she missed him harder until he came back and told her he loved her. She wanted him harder until he asked her to leave. She hated him harder until he wrote a book.

She loved him harder until she broke his heart.

Shaking her head, she turns a few pages.

**_Jess,_**

_She gazes at this one, has written it before, and thought it was him, not her, and moved on. Now, she does the same_

It confounds her, how simple that one word once was. His name in her handwriting, speaking volumes of June overlooking the Potomac.

It still sends her heart aflutter, like the infancy of the next summer, when his hands would skim under the hem of her shirt and make her think maybe:

he could be the one.

Then, he had left, and her heart hadn't fluttered so much as shattered.

So, she thinks, everything happens for a reason. Jess leaving was the same:

it made her grow, to see him go.

She smiles, because she would never be her without who she was with him.

**_Dear Jess,_**

**_I love Dean._**

_Knife, gut. She is insensitive._

_There are excuses for not sending this one:_

_It's almost a lie._

_It's not quite true anymore._

_It's hard to look at._

In the end, she thinks, she never sent the words because the idea of hurting him hurt herself.

Eventually, he hurt her, anyway, but in years since she has grown older and wiser. She knows, now:

she hurt him before he ever touched her.

Still, she thinks, she would never send this, if she could go back. (Oh, if only she could go back, oh the things she would change.)

She thinks she would start them anew.

That Dean could be a non-factor, because he never led anywhere good. Then, she realises that, for Jess:

neither did she.

So she leafs along the pages.

**_Dear Jess,_**

**_I could fall in love with you._**

_It is too honest and too raw, she thinks. She puts a line through the words, hoping to keep them from coming true._

_She has always thought words contained power, after all._

She can close her eyes and run her fingers over ink marks like rosaries. She can feel the indentation of future-past truths in blue-ruled Five Star white:

prophecy writ in blue BiC.

The words don't jump out, though. She cannot feel their shapes or their truth. She knows, intuitively, but that does not help her discern the curve and swoop of his name or confession in her hand.

Instead of trying, she knows the truth, that it doesn't matter.

So, she thinks. There I go, turn the page.

**_Dear Jess,_**

**_I'm afraid of how you'll hurt me._**

_She closes the notebook. There has become too much truth to these letters and she loves Dean (she thinks)._

_Closing the notebook, she tosses it into the bottom of her bag. She'll throw it away later._

She laughs quietly. There's one truth in the life, and to acknowledge it:

She drops the notebook into the bag of rubbish as her mother's voice sounds from the living room:

"Rory, Luke's back with the U-Haul. Are you ready?"

Am I ready? she wonders.

"Hey, Jess' with him. Good, we need all that man-muscle to cart all your crap to Philadelphia. How do you have so much stuff? You haven't actually lived here in _years_"

She grins. "Yeah, I'm ready."

Lorelai, walking into her bedroom, nods. "Right. Great. Hey, did you think packing might help with the getting ready?"

She looks up at her mother, they share a smile, because things are changing and they're finally okay with that.


End file.
